February 26, 2018

Car washes have been automated for decades, but companies developing fully autonomous vehicles must rely on a human touch to keep their cars and trucks in working condition.

Nope, you can't take them through your local automated car-wash. That's because residue can blind the vehicle, so they can't drive themselves safely. They have to be hand-washed, and that must be done often.

A self-driving vehicle’s exterior needs to be cleaned even more frequently than a typical car because the sensors must remain free of obstructions. Dirt, dead bugs, bird droppings or water spots can impact the vehicle’s ability to drive safely.

Cool: buy a self-driving car, then pay folks to hand-detail it every few days. Such a deal!

February 06, 2018

On the right stem of the glasses sits a suite of electronics designed to power a very low-powered laser (technically a VCSEL). That laser shines a red, monochrome image somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 x 150 pixels onto a holographic reflector on the glasses’ right lens. The image is then reflected into the back of your eyeball, directly onto the retina. The left stem also houses electronics, so the glasses are equally weighted on both sides.

It works with WiFi and prescription glasses, as well as non-prescription glasses, and you have to glance downward to see the display. Seems like an interesting idea, though I'm not sure that people will want to spend a lot of cash on a pair of glasses that hooks up to your phone in order to derive information.

January 29, 2018

Sensitive information about the location and staffing of military bases and spy outposts around the world has been revealed by a fitness tracking company. The map, released in November 2017, shows every single activity ever uploaded to Strava – more than 3 trillion individual GPS data points, according to the company. The app can be used on various devices including smartphones and fitness trackers like Fitbit to see popular running routes in major cities, or spot individuals in more remote areas who have unusual exercise patterns.

January 28, 2018

It turns out that the autopilot "feature" increasingly incorporated into cars has sort of a problem: the software's okay when it comes to detecting and avoiding objects that are in motion, but it sucks at detecting stationary objects, as this guy in L.A. discovered when his Tesla drove straight into a stopped firetruck on I-405. At 60 miles an hour. It didn't even slow down, because the "feature" didn't see a freakin' firetruck. That's a feature, not a bug:

It sounds like a glaring flaw, the kind of horrible mistake engineers race to eliminate. Nope. These systems are designed to ignore static obstacles because otherwise, they couldn't work at all.

That's not nearly as crazy as it may seem. Radar knows the speed of any object it sees, and is also simple, cheap, robust, and easy to build into a front bumper. But it also detects lots of things a car rolling down the highway needn't worry about, like overhead highway signs, loose hubcaps, or speed limit signs. So engineers make a choice, telling the car to ignore these things and keep its eyes on the other cars on the road: They program the system to focus on the stuff that's moving.

November 14, 2017

The FDA has approved a "smart" pill that can tell whether you've taken it as directed and relay that information to a device that your doctor can read to objectively determine compliance.

The medicine is a version of Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co Ltd’s established drug Abilify for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression, containing a tracking device developed by Proteus Digital Health.

Just what we need. Cameras everywhere aren't enough, and Google's "assistant" and similar devices record every word spoken in the home, saving them to the cloud servers. Now, your medications can track you as well.

But there are still some places in the Pacific Northwest where you can get away from it all:

The Yakima Herald reports there is little to no cell phone service along the Mountain Loop Highway that brings travelers to the Big Four Ice Caves near the Verlot ranger station. The caves draw about 50,000 visitors annually. Most 911 calls for the region come from the pay phone at the Verlot Public Service Center.

Frontier Communications owns that phone, and they're going to take it out. So if you want to get away from it all, you'll really be away from it all.

November 09, 2017

Amid considerable fanfare, Las Vegas launched its driverless bus yesterday - and in less than two hours, it ran into a semi-truck. Officials were proud to lead the nation by unveiling the first driverless shuttle pilot project, and dozens of people were lined up awaiting their turn s for a free ride. They must have been disappointed....

The oval-shaped shuttle that can transport up to 12 passengers has an attendant and computer monitor, but no steering wheel and no brake pedals. It uses GPS, electronic curb sensors and other technology to make its way.

And not very effectively, by all appearances.

It looks as though they focused more on aesthetics than anything else; that oval design is just so darned cute. And what could be more comforting than traveling in a self-driving egg?

October 23, 2017

Although they make most of their money from ads, that's because they do software and data aggregation really well. And what they plan to do is to integrate their AI software with hardware, and from there, into your daily life.

It started this week with the launch of the new Pixel 2 phones, which, despite their ugly designs and iffy screens, got largely positive reviews. Next come a slew of new gadgets — wireless earbuds, an attractive Chromebook, jumbo and mini versions of its Google Home smart speaker, a GoPro-like camera, and a refined version of its virtual-reality headset.

The underlying theme of that event was Google Assistant, the company's voice-assistant technology that competes with Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri.

They're integrating Assistant into all of the above hardware, and more. Although Assistant's only about a year old, it already outperforms Siri, Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana, in large part because Google has tons of data on you, which Assistant can draw upon to provide faster and more reliable results. Every new Android phone, no matter who makes it, will come with Assistant built-in.

By the way, those Pixel Buds - the aforementioned wireless earbuds - can translate languages in real time, which is, as Spock would say, "fascinating". When I was at the grocer earlier today, I heard people conversing in Spanish and others in Chinese. Having a set of earbuds translating that in real time would be, at least at the outset, interesting.

October 22, 2017

Big Mouth Billy Bass was an animatronic fish on a plaque that was popular a couple of decades ago, for some unknown reason. Now, someone who clearly has too much time on his hands has tagged one into Amazon's Echo:

A lot of people are forking over $50 or more to buy "assistants" such as Amazon's Echo, meaning that they're actually paying the company to spy on them under the guise of helpfulness. Some of the units even feature cameras, so you can be "seen" even in dim lighting conditions. At least in "1984" the ubiquitous monitoring setups were installed by Big Brother.

Many people are starting to become uneasy about all of this; the whole "Internet of Things" is coming to be questioned. Do you really need a smart toaster or refrigerator? Do you need to have Alexa dim your lights for you?

Thanks, I'll do it myself.

Buying one of these "assistants" means that you're paying to abrogate your own Fourth Amendment rights.

August 24, 2017

Americans check their phones about 47 times per day, according to a survey by Deloitte, which affords plenty of opportunities for microorganisms to move from your fingers to your phone.

Sadly, that survey's probably true, judging from all the folks you see at, say, the grocery store who are slowly pushing a shopping cart (if not completely stopped) while yapping on their phone or poking at the screen on the phone. So how many germs do they transfer from the shopping cart handle to their phone (and vice-versa)? Many phones harbor over 17,000.

Scientists at the University of Arizona have found that cell phones carry 10 times more bacteria than most toilet seats.

Oh, and don't use your phone while in a bathroom - when toilets flush, they spread germs everywhere, which is one of the ways some people end up carrying e.coli around on their phones. The cell phone, it seems, is one of the most addictive things in the lives of many people.